Kanban helps us with goals and to overcome issues of limited capacity in several ways:

1. The most obvious is that you can write down your tasks/goals/etc and not have to hold those ideas in your brain. This gives you a specific idea of what you have to do and eliminates wasted effort of holding items, checking, and rechecking that can often take place when trying to balance several ideas at once. This is one reason why limiting work in progress (a fundamental idea of kanban) can really help improve workflow.

2. The value stream map associated with kanban provides clarity as to the steps that must be accomplished for something to be complete. Visualizing the process is also a fundamental part of kanban that helps us know the next step without having to draw from our limited supply of cognitive resources.

3. When tasks are organized on a kanban board they are clearly defined because they are broken down in to action items that are specific. This not only helps to determine priority, but it increases commitment. Writing something down is a different level of commitment than simply thinking of doing something.

4. The kanban board can also be used to get to one of the important fundamentals of goal-setting: feedback. The visual display shows your progress, essentially giving feedback at a glance. Additional feedback can also be gathered from metrics like efficiency, cycle time, and lead time that are calculated in Zen.

First and foremost, we just launched a redesign of the Zen marketing site along with new features. We continue to work to provide the best possible product. I’m definitely staying busy with answering support and running the business side of things.

In case you haven’t heard yet, Enkari, Ltd. received a “Stage A” grant from the Innovation Fund in the amount of $25,000 in September. We’re obviously quite thankful for the opportunity to work with a great group of business people. As part of the grant, we participated in an open house to demo the product and I represented the company on a panel discussion about entrepreneurship last Wednesday.

I’m also teaching cognitive processes this semester, and it has been a great experience so far. My students are motivated, which definitely makes teaching more fun.

I’m working on my dissertation and trying to get it to a point that I can propose it to a committee in the Spring. I’m hoping to blog more about that as things develop. I’m using Zen as a personal kanban to help keep me on track. It’s been very helpful, and it just goes to show that Zen can be used to organize just about anything. Yes, that was totally a shameless plug, but it’s true. :)

Lastly, I’ve been working with other graduate students to get the Hop-On Student Venture Fund off the ground. We’re at the point now where we are going to be looking for donations from the community, so I’m hoping we can make progress on that soon.

There are many other personality characteristics I’ve read about from need for achievement, optimism, and self-confidence to independence and opportunity recognition. I am curious if people have some other interesting ideas about the characteristics of entrepreneurs. 

1. You have to think of everything as a learning experience. It just isn’t possible for everything to turn out exactly how you planned, so at the very least, learn from your mistakes (and the mistakes of others). Failing at something once is okay as long as you did the best you could with the knowledge you had.

2. Be smart about the risks that you take. In order to start your own business, you have to take some risks. It is all about knowing the limits of those risks and thinking about the pluses and minuses. Good risks require some thought and planning.

3. Work on diversifying your skill set. As an entrepreneur you are going to have to do a little of everything (whether you want to or not), so study up on the basics of accounting, marketing, etc. You just need to know enough up front to get the basics down and know where to look for the right answers when things come up.

4. Study up on the culture, expectations, norms, etc. of your customers because you need to know how to appeal to them.

5. Know your weaknesses. Everyone has them and it isn’t possible to be good at everything. What you need to do is make sure that someone else on your founding team can balance them out. That’s the key to building a good team.

6. Networking is really important, not only with those in your target market, but also with business people, other entrepreneurs, and anyone else that might be willing to open doors for you. The more people you meet, the more contacts you have to answer questions, mentor you, make introductions to others, etc.

7. Don’t waste your time doing things you don’t love. Focus on your passion and cut out the things that aren’t adding value to your life. This is important because if you really don’t care, you’ll end up content to be average and average is for losers. If you aren’t going to go all in on something, then there’s no point.

8. You have to be flexible and act quickly. This is one of the biggest things in my opinion. Issues you never thought about are going to come up and there’s only so much you can do to prevent them. When they come up you just have to work the problem.

9. Focus on planning and organizing the things that you can control. You don’t want to waste time re-organizing if you could have done it right the first time with a little extra effort.

10. Surround yourself with positive people. Being positive all the time is really hard, so you need someone there to pick you up when you are down (and someone you can motivate when they need it).

11. Don’t give up. Anything worth pursuing is going to be difficult.

I’m finishing up my research assistantship and consulting. We finally completed the data collection process, and I’ve spent the last few weeks analyzing data. I only have a few more weeks to go. I’m going to be teaching Cognitive Processes in the Fall, so I still have to find time over the next month to prep everything.

My dissertation work is coming along slowly. I am going to observe an entrepreneurial education program next week and hope to be surveying the students in a month or two.

The Hop-On Student Venture Fund is going well. We’ve done quite a bit of work over the last month to get all of our paperwork together. We presented to the board yesterday, and our DBA was approved. Next on our list is recruitment and looking for donations during August.

The biggest (and best) thing this month has been the successful launch of Zen. We have had continued growth over the last 3 1/2 weeks. The response has been very positive from the reviews and blog posts to the twitter comments and feedback on the site. I am definitely happy to see things going so well. I know that there will be lots of things to talk about as we develop the product further.

1. Resistance is going to happen because people naturally have defense mechanisms against messing with their stability. This resistance can be on many levels according to Maurer (2006).

a. People might just need more information to really get what you are trying to do. This is pretty common and easy to change (though often forgotten about), so keeping people in the loop is very important.

b. Emotional reactions are also very common, so you have to let people take some time to get adjusted to the idea. It is easier to talk to people when they have taken some time to process. This means expecting people to embrace a change overnight is unrealistic.

c. Sometimes resistance isn’t to the idea, but to the messenger. The person who delivers the message of change is going to affect how people perceive it. Middle management is especially important for change because they communicate the message down to their employees (assuming that the change comes from the top, which isn’t always the case). Sometimes managers say what they are supposed to say, but they don’t really commit to it, so that is going to affect the success of the change initiative.

2. There are also different types of commitment, which have different effects according to Herscovitch & Meyer (2002). 

a. The best kind of commitment to have is affective, meaning people are emotionally invested in the idea. The more people are involved in the process and have a voice, even if it doesn’t go their way, the more likely they are to be affectively committed.  This is the best way to get people to engage in discretionary behaviors in the workplace like cooperation and championing.

3. There needs to be a sense of urgency related to the change. People/companies rarely want to change when things seem to be going well. Organizational Development consultants suggest doing a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) to really get at that sense of urgency (Maurer, 2006). 

To sustain commitment over time an organization needs strong (and well-respected) leaders, clear communication with people at all levels of the organization, enough resources to make the change happen, a little time, and clear measures of success.

As with any milestone in life, you don’t get there alone, so I would like to thank a few people. First of all, I’d like to thank Nate for always challenging me to be the best that I can be. I would also like to thank my parents because they always believe in me, no matter what I’m doing. Whether it was watching my dance performances as a kid, sitting out in the rain to watch me play sax when I was in high school marching band, or watching me walk across the stage to get my Masters, they’ve always been there to cheer me on.

I’d like to thank my advisor from UA, Bob Lord, who taught me how to be an optimist and see the best in every situation. Somewhere in the world is Michael Frese, a psychology/entrepreneurship researcher that I saw speak at the IOOB conference a year and a half ago. He doesn’t know it, but his talk on how personality is one of the most important factors for entrepreneurs’ success changed my life. It was the first of many experiences that made me believe that this day was possible. Also, to all the entrepreneurs I’ve met recently, thank you for being an inspiration.

I’d also like to thank those people in the software community who have helped get the word out there about the product, test it, and give us feedback.

I know that running a business is like a marriage in that the real work begins after the launch date (wedding day), but I know that Nate and I are up for the challenge.

Anyway since my blog posts are always way too long, I’ll stop rambling now so you can check out Zen for yourself. :)

Applying formalization to setting up your kanban board should be relatively simple. The kanban board should build off of the understandings of the employees. This means that going to a kanban board should start off with a few simple changes before trying to implement a serious organizational change. Also, your board whether online or manual should work with employees and not against them. Other than the absolutely necessary restrictions such as limiting work in progress, there should not be a need to implement many hard restrictions and kanban software should be designed with flexibility in mind (like Zen). There should be a shared understanding of how the process works within the employees, but the software should not force unnecessary restrictions. For example, if a team wants to restrict certain things (such limiting one card of a particular color in a stage of the value stream), the software should not enforce that restriction. Departments or other teams may not want the same restriction. By forcing this restriction it is coercive rather than enabling because it works against the wishes of a certain group. Not only that but the understanding of any restrictions should come from a shared mental model within a team and not from the software. By creating too many restrictions in the software it gives the impression to employees that they can’t figure out how to create an effective process on their own. I think it is pretty clear that this would undermine the motivational potential of using kanban for project management.

There has been quite a lot of work on formalization and bureaucracy in organizational theory. Most people think about formalization in the classic Weber (1922) sense of bureaucracy (who published a lot of work of effective organizational structures), but there is a difference between the two in that formalization is simply having assigned roles and guidelines that people follow, while bureaucracy is taking the role and rules to an extreme by setting up roles that are strictly assigned and a hierarchy of authority where information flows from the top of the structure to the bottom. Weber suggested that a bureaucratic structure would lead to greater speed and efficiency and less role ambiguity. While this is probably true in some cases, it tends to go hand-in-hand with the typical command-and-control mentality that simply does not work for creative and thought-based work. Though a company can and should provide a strong vision for their product or service, managers, the organizational structure, and the process set up for the completion of work should not be giving orders and restricting the way that people work.

Instead, companies should focus on a less strict form of formalization, called enabling formalization. This type of formalization provides role clarity, allows for learning, and creates an environment conducive to quick decision-making (Perrow, 1986). If the structure is enabling, it allows people to interact with the environment, which is important because it mobilizes the intelligence of the employees, rather than trying to replace it (Adler & Borys, 1996). The point is that your formalization structure should not replace the thoughts of your employees. This means that the structure of an organization should be set up to use best practices that are drawn from the thoughts and experiences of the employees (Nelson & Winter, 1982). In order for the formalization of the organization to be considered enabling, it needs to facilitate the procedures necessary for business and not create a strict structure in and of itself that works against employees.